While we recognize and thank Mr. DiNapoli for his service, Harry Wilson is the kind of comptroller New York needs right now. A hedge fund manager who specialized in restructuring troubled companies and served on President Obama’s auto industry task force, he has the financial chops that Mr. DiNapoli lacks. It surely can’t hurt to have someone who knows finance as the sole trustee of the $124.8 billion Common Retirement Fund, one of the largest pension systems in the world.

Mr. Wilson, this campaign has shown, has a sense of urgency on some of the gravest fiscal problems facing New York. Those include the question of whether the state pension system is adequately funded, and how state and local governments will deal with the largely unfunded, long-term cost of what is estimated to be a more than $200 billion tab for retiree health insurance.

While Mr. DiNapoli, to be sure, has been as outspoken on issues like the state’s financial problems as any comptroller in memory, Mr. Wilson is a real outsider in a town where just about everyone, it seems, would like to pretend to be one right now.

And of Cuomo the board issued less of an endorsement than a notice of high expectations:

Andrew Cuomo has been governor-in-waiting for so long now, while first one predecessor and then another failed at the job, that Tuesday’s election looms as an anticlimax. To deem him more than qualified for an office that he’s coveted for years is the easy part. New Yorkers will need to judge him again and again, to see if he can deliver on his bold promises to fix the broken government of this once proud state.

We can’t recall when our endorsement came with higher and more urgent expectations. State government has become a pitiful, at times contemptible, captive of special interests and institutional inertia. It once again needs the direction and purpose required to serve the people who pay for it.

Every New Yorker, in fact, might brace for having to pay still more — for the sins and inefficiencies of the past. Mr. Cuomo will need to prevail over the Legislature and the constituencies to which it’s so beholden not only to spend less, but also not to raise taxes or increase borrowing.